r/grow_nyc

DSA socialist-in-office Julia Salazar is pushing a bill for rent stabilization in commercial leases. While it would provide some relief to businesses facing rent increases, it would also structurally benefit the current business tenants with below market rents, which may give a lifeline to mediocre / uncompetitive businesses in favor of new ones that could run a profitable shop/restaurant/etc on a market rate lease.

Consider your favorite new restaurant - what if it never could have opened because there was a shortage of commercial lease space available?

Of course this also hurts landlords who now won’t be able to adjust rents to match rising costs, especially if the proposed board becomes as politicized as the RGB.

For most of the past few decades, the debate over building in New York was about whether the city even wanted to grow. That has changed. Both the Governor and the Mayor rode the affordability crisis into office on explicitly pro-building platforms, the City of Yes legislation all passed, voters approved the 2025 housing ballot measures, and the state recently reformed environmental review.

By my read, this is the most pro-building moment New York has seen since the 1961 zoning resolution.

The catch is that political will turns out to be the easy part. The constraint now is capacity and whether the city can actually build housing and transit fast and cheap enough to make a dent in affordability. New York's transit construction costs are the highest of any major city in the world, recent rezonings have not yet translated into anywhere near the number of units built in past decades, and funding for capital projects remains unpredictable.

In the linked piece, I walk through specific ways to fix this, from rezoning transit-rich neighborhoods like the area south of Prospect Park to using land value capture to fund projects like the Interborough Express to common sense building code reforms like single-stair allowances and lower elevator minimums.

Curious what people here think the city should prioritize first, and where you would want to see the next round of rezoning or transit investment go.

On the 2024 NAEP eighth-grade math exam, Black and Latino New York students scored below white students by 26 and 30 points, respectively. New York was ranked 38th in the nation for fourth-grade math, behind all other Northeastern states besides Maine, and 17 points below top-ranked Massachusetts. 

Author is the president and CEO of the Community Preservation Corporation, a nonprofit multifamily finance company, and former commissioner of the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

For everyone cheering the downfall of the greedy landlord class - worth hearing what the non profits are saying about this.

New York City is spending nearly $290 million next year to prevent budget cuts at schools that have lost or are projected to lose enrollment, according to new Education Department data.

It’s more than double what the city spent prior to the beginning of the 2025-26 school year on the policy known as “hold harmless.”